How to Make a Watercolor Brush in Adobe Illustrator

Always wondered how to create a watercolor brush in Adobe Illustrator, but never knew exactly where to start. Well, if that's the case, then you're in luck, since in this video I'm going to walk you through the entire process and show you how to do so using three simple methods. I'm Andrew, and you're watching an Envato Tuts Plus tutorial. By default, Illustrator comes with its own pack of watercolor brushes, which can be found by opening up the Brushes panel and then heading over to the Brush Libraries menu, Artistic, Artistic Watercolor. While basic, these brushes do a fine job at letting you explore your creativity, but what if you decided to make a couple of your own? Well, you can, and I'm going to show you how in the following moments. The first method relies on using the bristle brush. We're going to start by opening up the Brushes panel and then clicking on the New Brush button. A new window prompt will appear, asking us what type of brush we want to create, which in our case is a bristle brush. As soon as we hit OK, Illustrator will bring up the Bristle Brush Options window, where we're going to give our new brush a custom name, and then start adjusting its different settings. The first option is called Shape, and lets us choose between ten different brush types. For this current example, I'm going to go with around 0.1, but feel free to try something different if you feel like experimenting. Moving on down, we have Size, which as the name suggests, allows us to control the width of our brush. Personally, I'm going to set it to 6 millimeters, which should make it easier to see what the other options do. We then have Bristle Length, which lets us adjust the distance between the bristle's tip and the point where it meets the handle. The greater the length is, the denser and wider the brush will end up being. In my case, I'm going to increase the default value to 120%. Next, we have Bristle Density, which controls the number of bristles or hair segments found within the brush's tip. I'm going to set it to 20%, which will give me that nice transparent overlapping that watercolor paints are known for. We then have Bristle Thickness, which as the name suggests, controls the thickness of the brush's composing hair segments. For our current example, I'm going to set the thickness to 20%. The fifth option is Paint Opacity, which I'm going to lower to 64%. Finally, we have Stiffness, which controls the rigidity of the bristles. Since I want the brush to look and feel more flexible, I'm going to use a value of just 24%. Once we're done making all the final adjustments, we can hit the OK button, which will immediately add a new brush to our library. To use the brush, all we have to do is select it from within the brush's panel, and then start drawing using the paintbrush tool. We can easily adjust the size and color of the brush by changing the stroke's weight and color as needed. Now that we've seen how we can create a watercolor brush using the bristle brush method, let's move on to the second one, which relies on using a scan image of an actual watercolor brush. Using either an image scanner or your phone's camera, transfer your brush stroke to your computer, and then remove the white background using either Photoshop or any other image editing tool that you have, making sure to save it using a file format that supports transparency. Once you're done, go back into Illustrator and create a new document, placing the resulting image inside of it by heading over to File, Place, or by using the Shift Ctrl P keyboard shortcut. Next, we need to rasterize the image by heading over to Object, Rasterize, making sure to set the background to transparent. Quickly scale down the rasterized image so that we can turn it into a proper digital brush. All we have to do now is open up the brush's panel, and then create a new brush, making sure to set the brush type to Art Brush. A new Art Brush Options window will appear, and we'll give it a custom name. And then make sure that the Brush Scale Options is set to Stretch to Fit Stroke Length, and the Adjust Corners and Falls to Prevent Overlaps option is checked. Once we hit OK, our new brush will be added to our library, which means that we can now select the Paintbrush tool and use it to draw. Unfortunately, since we're using an image, we can't change the brush's color, which is why the second method might not be the best solution when it comes to turning a traditional brush stroke into a digital one. This is where the third method shines, since it gives us full control over a scanned brush. As we did with the previous method, we're going to go through the exact same process of placing, rasterizing, and then scaling the scanned brush stroke inside of Illustrator. Once the image is ready, we're going to open up the Image Trace window by heading over to Window, Image Trace, where we'll want to set the preset to High Fidelity Photo. Next, we're going to lower the number of colors, since depending on the details of the scanned stroke, it can affect your computer's performance due to the high number of paths and anchors created during the tracing process. Once you're ready, we can click on the Expand button, which will convert our scanned image into a vector one. Our next step is to remove all the white shapes, and we will do so by first selecting any one of them, and then simply heading over to Select, Same, Fill Color, and then immediately press in Delete. At this point, we can open up the Brushes panel and create a new art brush, making sure to give it a custom name, and then change its colorization method to Tints and Shades, and that's it. To use the brush, all we have to do is select it from within the Brushes panel, and then start drawing using the Paintbrush tool. Compared to the previous method, the Image Trace one allows us to change the color of our brush at any time, which will produce some interesting watercolor effects. So, there you have it, three completely different methods that you can use to create your own watercolor brushes in a matter of minutes. That being said, I hope you found this video useful, and I'll see you in the next one.